Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

In order to focus on how SES affects the gap in test scores over time, we must give a brief overview of the potential reasons for the gap in test scores in general. It could be possible that children with genetically superior ability perform relatively better on ability tests than those with less ability. Psychologists before the 1970s argued that genetic differences are not primarily responsible for test score performance since age scores of children vary with their respective ages (Kleinberg 1963). Many arguments have been made that it is school quality that affects children's test scores (Loehlin, Lindzey, and Spuhler 1975). Phillips et. al (1998), focusing on black children, argues that it is in fact home environment that contributes to lower tests scores, causing those with poor home environments to start school at a disadvantage with regards to tests scores. Fryer and Levitt provide evidence against this by finding that there is no gap at entry between black and white children, implying that it is in fact something about the school environment that induces such gaps. The consensus within the economic and psychologist literature appears to be aligned more with the view of Phillips than of Fryer and Levitt.

We aim to provide evidence for or against Fryer and Levitt's findings by trying to replicate their results using a different data set. Our initial methodology will bear high resemblance to their original paper. We use pooled cross-sections to construct trends in tests scores among various age groups. But our work extends the research done by Fryer and Levitt by tracking the gap in scores at five different instances in time, as opposed to two instances. We also extend on their research by studying transitory income shocks as they relate to test scores via first differences models. Unfortunately, first differences models remove a permanent notion of SES precisely because SES is defined as time-invariant. We instead look at how SES and race affect changes in test scores and let the effect of income shocks differ by SES and race by including interaction terms.

In summary, we use pooled cross-sections to analyze permanent income measures similar to the analysis in Fryer and Levitt and first difference models to analyze transitory income shocks as they relate to changes in test scores.

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Studies of motherhood wage penalty typically focus on the "pure" effect of children, holding all else equal. But as all parents know, the arrival of a child means that nothing stays the same. One change especially salient to labor economists is that many mothers exit the work force. Absences from the labor market are likely to reduce wages because general and firm-specific skills depreciate and workers lose rents associated with good job matches. Low-skilled workers may be less vulnerable to such earnings erosion, since they have less human capital and their wages reflect less rent. If so, these workers may escape a motherhood wage penalty. Conversely, we would expect highly skilled women to experience the largest penalties for exiting the labor force to care for their children.

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The proportion of adolescents in the United States who are obese has nearly tripled over the last two decades. At the same time, schools, often citing financial pressures, have given students greater access to "junk" foods and soda pop, using proceeds from these sales to fund school programs. We examine whether schools under financial pressure are more likely to adopt potentially unhealthful food policies. Next, we examine whether students' Body Mass Index (BMI) is higher in counties where a greater proportion of schools are predicted to allow these food policies. Because the financial pressure variables that predict school food policies are unlikely to affect BMI directly, this two step estimation strategy addresses the potential endogeneity of school food policies. We find that a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of schools in a county that allow students access to junk food leads to about a one percent increase in students' BMI, on average. However, this average effect is entirely driven by adolescents who have an overweight parent, for whom the effect of such food policies is much larger (2.2%). This suggests that those adolescents who have a genetic or family susceptibility to obesity are most affected by the school food environment. A rough calculation suggests that the increase in availability of junk foods in schools can account for about one-fifth of the increase in average BMI among adolescents over the last decade.

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The empirical results presented in this study make it rather difficult to accept an extreme hypothesis of labor market segmentation. The secondary sector hardly appears to be an economic prison from which there is no escape. In addition, contrary to the principal tenets of the dual labor market theory, investments in the skills and abilities of black youth appear to have payoffs in terms of entry into better jobs and in terms of higher earnings as well, even when employed in what is defined herein as the secondary market sector. Nonetheless, the evidence strongly suggests that invidious racial discrimination denies numerous youth the socioeconomic fruits warranted by their human assets.

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Nonmarital childbearing has increased substantially over the last few decades, comprising almost one-third of all births in the United States in 1995 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1997). Poverty rates for these children are high, and many rely on public assistance. Reducing nonmarital childbearing and increasing responsibility of absent fathers were important goals of the 1996 welfare-reform legislation and earlier state and federal child-support legislation. Although there is some evidence that paternity-establishment efforts increase the likelihood of child-support awards (Cynthia Miller and Irwin Garfinkel, 1999; Argys et al., 2001), until recently microdata to assess the determinants and consequences of paternity were not available. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort (NLSY97) to explore the determinants of paternity and the relationship between paternity and father involvement, such as child-support awards and contact between fathers and children. Our data show that paternity is associated with increases in all types of involvement. However, if the correlation is due solely to unobserved heterogeneity, then paternity policies would not have a causal effect on involvement. In this paper we model the paternity and father-involvement decisions jointly. Our results suggest that welfare, child-support, and paternity policies do alter the probability of establishing paternity, and that exogenous increases in paternity can affect father-child interactions.

Bibliography Citation

Argys, Laura M. and H. Elizabeth Peters. "Interactions between Unmarried Fathers and Their Children: The Role of Paternity Establishment and Child-Support Policies." Presented: New Orleans, LA, American Economic Association Meeting, January 2001.

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For children from non-intact households, the receipt of an additional dollar of child support has been found to have benefits that are several times larger than those of mother's earnings or family income (John W. Graham et al., 1994; Virginia W. Knox, 1996; Laura M. Argys et al., 1998). The obvious explanation is that custodians who receive child support or noncustodians who pay child support differ from those who do not in unobserved ways. In this case, the child-support variable will pick up the effects of omitted variables with which it is correlated. Graham et al. (1994) and Knox (1996) attempt to correct for unobserved heterogeneity using instrumental variables. Their results show that the coefficient estimate on child-support income is much larger than that on family income. However, because of the imprecision of the estimates, one cannot conclude that child support has a benefit to children that is significantly larger than that of other income. This paper examines an alternative reason for the finding that child support has a larger impact on children than other dollars: child-support transfers and investments in children are strategically linked. A current payment of child support by a noncustodial parent (NCP) may depend on the past investments in the child by the custodial parent (CP). Because a NCP is unlikely to have complete information about investments in his child, he may use information about the child's achievement as a signal of how well the CP cares for the child. This would provide the CP with an incentive to invest more in the child than she would otherwise. This hypothesis is tested by estimating the effect of child achievement on the probability that a custodial parent receives child support and on the amount of child support received using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Mother-Child Supplement. No previous estimation of child support has included measures of child achievement.

Why Is the Rate of College Dropout So High?
Presented: Atlanta GA, American Economic Association Annual Meeting, January 2019
Cohort(s):
NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher:
American Economic AssociationKeyword(s):
College Education; Dropouts

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During most of the twentieth century, the U.S. led the world in the percentage of its population with a college education; today, that lead has vanished. Sparked in part by the growth in the college wage premium, the proportion of high school graduates going on to post‐secondary school has been on the rise in recent decades. However, this increase in college attendance has not resulted in a proportionate rise in the number of those with four year‐degrees, because the United States has the highest dropout rate in the developed world. With a college education said to be increasingly necessary to compete in the labor market, it is important to understand why so many individuals do not achieve success in postsecondary institutions. We address this issue by examining the college attendance and completion experience of two cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), that from 1979 and that from 1997. The percentage of high school completers who attend college rose by almost 30 percentage points between the NLSY79 and NLSY97 samples. The bulk of the growth is through starting college at a two‐year institution. This is the case throughout the test score and family income distributions. In contrast, the percentage of college attendees who earn a bachelor's degree six years after high school completion is unchanged between the two cohorts (at about 37 percent), with an increase for women and a decrease for men.

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Using data from the U.S. Decennial Census and the National Longitudinal Surveys, we find little evidence of differences in the return to schooling across racial and ethnic groups, even with attempts to control for ability and measurement error biases. While our point estimates are relatively similar across racial and ethnic groups, our conclusion is driven in part by relatively large standard errors. That said, we find no evidence that returns to schooling are lower for African Americans or Hispanics than for non-minorities. As a result, policies that increase education among the low-skilled have a good possibility of increasing economic well-being and reducing inequality. More generally, our analysis suggests further research is needed to better understand the nature of measurement error and ability bias across subgroups in order to fully understand potential heterogeneity in the return to schooling across the population.

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This paper evaluates the effects of maternal vs. alternative care providers' time inputs on children's cognitive development using the sample of single mothers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. To deal with the selection problem created by unobserved heterogeneity of mothers and children, we develop a model of mother's employment and child-care decisions. Guided by this model, we obtain approximate decisions rules for employment and child care use, and estimate these jointly with the child's cognitive ability production function – an approach we refer to as "quasi-structural." This joint estimation implements a selection correction. To help identify our selection model, we take advantage of the substantial and plausibly exogenous variation in employment and child-care choices of single mothers generated by the variation in welfare rules across states and over time – especially, the large changes created by the 1996 welfare reform legislation and earlier State waivers. Welfare rules provide natural exclusion restrictions, as it is plausible they enter decision rules for employment and day care use, while not entering the child cognitive ability production function directly. Our results imply that if a mother works full-time, while placing a child in day care, for one full year, it reduces the child's cognitive ability test score by roughly 2.7% on average, which is 0.14 standard deviations of the score distribution. However, we find evidence of substantial observed and unobserved heterogeneity in the day care effect. Negative effects of day care on test scores are larger for better-educated mothers and for children with larger skill endowments.

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We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioral problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting with variation in schooling costs when the mother grew up. Using matched data from the female participants of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and their children, we can control for mother's ability and family background factors. Our results show substantial intergenerational returns to education. For children aged 7-8, for example, our IV results indicate that an additional year of mother's schooling increases the child's performance on a standardized math test by almost 0.1 of a standard deviation, and reduces the incidence of behavioral problems. Our data set allows us to study a large array of channels which may transmit the effect of maternal education to the child, including family environment and parental investments at different ages of the child. We find that income effects, delayed childbearing, and assortative mating are likely to be important, and we show that maternal education leads to substantial differences in maternal labor supply. We investigate heterogeneity in returns, and we present results focusing both on very early stages in the child's life as well as adolescent outcomes. We present a falsification exercise to support the validity of our instruments, and our results are found to be robust in a sensitivity analysis. We discuss policy implications and relate our findings to intergenerational mobility.

Bibliography Citation

Carneiro, Pedro M., Costas Meghir and Matthias Parey. "Maternal Education, Home Environments and the Development of Children and Adolescents." Presented: Denver, CO, American Economic Association Annual Meeting, January 2011. Forthcoming: Journal of European Economic Association.

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This study examines changes in returns to formal education and cognitive ability
over the last 20 years using the 1979 and 1997 waves of the National Longitudinal
Survey of Youth. We show that cognitive skills had a substantially larger impact on
wages in the 1980s than in the 2000s. Returns to education were higher in the 2000s.
These developments are not explained by changing distributions of workers’ observable
characteristics or by changing labor market structure. We show that the decline
in returns to ability can be attributed to differences in the growth rate of technology
between the 1980s and 2000s.

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Childhood obesity around the world, and particularly in the United States, is an escalating problem that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood. In this paper we employ the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on children and adolescents being overweight. The advertising measure used is the number of hours of spot television fast-food restaurant advertising messages seen per week. Our results indicate that a ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 14 percent. The elimination of the tax deductibility of this type of advertising would produce smaller declines of between 5 and 7 percent in these outcomes but would impose lower costs on children and adults who consume fast food in moderation because positive information about restaurants that supply this type of food would not be banned completely from television.

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Although mental disorders are common among children, we know little about their long term effects on child outcomes. This paper examines U.S. and Canadian children with symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), depression, conduct disorders, and other behavioral problems. Our work offers a number of innovations. First we use large nationally representative samples of children from both countries. Second, we focus on "screeners" that were administered to all children in our sample, rather than on diagnosed cases. Third, we address omitted variables bias by estimating sibling-fixed effects models. Fourth, we examine a range of outcomes. Fifth, we ask how the effects of mental health conditions are mediated by family income and maternal education. We find that mental health conditions have large negative effects on future test scores and schooling attainment, regardless of family income and maternal education.

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At the end of 2011, almost seven million US residents were under the supervision of the
correction system. An unknown but significantly larger number of people has at some point
been under the supervision of the correction system. As ex-offenders are released, they face
the challenge of reentering the labor market. This paper examines a broad set of policies that
influence whether an individual’s criminal history record is observed by a potential employer.
Using the first fourteen waves of the NLSY97, there is evidence that labor market outcomes
are worse for ex-offenders when their criminal histories are easily accessible to employers.
Non-offenders from highly offending groups have significantly better labor market outcomes
in the presence of open records. The net effect of open information supports the notion that
employers statistically discriminate in the absence of criminal history data.

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We investigate the empirical relationship between wages and labor market conditions. Following work histories in the NLSY79 we document that the relationship between wages and unemployment rate differs across occupations. The results hold after controlling for unobserved match quality. This suggests that evidence about history dependence of wages obtained from pooled samples conceals significant differences and provides an imprecise description of earning dynamics. We examine these discrepancies and offer new evidence suggesting that the sensitivity of wages to current unemployment is linked to the prevalence of performance pay.

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This paper develops and structurally estimates a life-cycle model where health, education, and wealth are endogenous accumulated processes depending on the history of an individual's optimal behaviors, on parental factors, and on cognitive and noncognitive abilities. The model investigates different pathways between education, health, and wealth by introducing endogenous human capital production, health production, and addictive preferences of unhealthy behavior in the presence of credit constraints. The effects of education on health include both the direct benefits of improving health production efficiency and the indirect benefits of reducing unhealthy behavior and raising earnings. Using data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 97, we estimate the model using a two-step estimation procedure based on factor analysis and simulated method of moments. Using estimated model, we quantify the relative importance of socioeconomic determinants of human capital inequality and health inequality. We also use to model to conduct counterfactual policy experiments.

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This paper examines the issue of male joblessness and its relationship to family formation, particularly the recent growth of black female-headed families. Using data from the NLSY, the author tested the effects of local labor market unemployment rates and young men's previous job experience on the likelihood that they would remain childless, become absent fathers, or become fathers living with their children. It was found that neither the measure of local labor market conditions nor prior joblessness of the young men studied affected fatherhood outcomes.

Bibliography Citation

Lerman, Robert I. "Employment Opportunities of Young Men and Family Formation." Proceedings, American Economic Association (May 1989): 62-66.

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We use an IV approach to examine the causal effect of mother's high school education on child health using the 1979-2002 waves of the NLSY79 and the 1990-2002 waves of the NLSY79CY. We instrument education with a rich set of education policy variables. We find that mothers who complete high school are more likely to report their child was ill enough to need a doctor, that their child was ill more times, and that their child was more likely to have fractured or dislocated a bone in the past 12 months that required medical attention or treatment. Across samples of mothers who dropped out of high school and who completed high school, we find no difference in the date of their children's last routine health checkup, percentiles for weight-for-age, height-for-age, BMI-for-age, or in the probability of children at risk of overweight and of being overweight. When we examined the possible mechanisms, we found that mother's high school education increases mother's age at child's birth, health insurance coverage and child care use. We also find suggestive evidence of a much more complex set of behaviors that are causally related to education (child care use, health insurance status, fertility decisions) and that likely affect child health. This preliminary evidence suggests that much more work needs to be done before one can strongly conclude that child health does or does not systematically vary with differences in maternal education on the margin we study.

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We analyze the roles and interrelationships between school inputs and parental inputs in affecting child development through the specification and estimation of a behavioral model of household migration and maternal employment decisions. We integrate information on these decisions with observations on child outcomes over a 13-year period from the NLSY. We find that the impact of our school quality measures diminish by a factor of 2 to 4 after accounting for the fact that families may choose where to live in part based on school characteristics and labor market opportunities. The positive statistical relationship between child outcomes and maternal employment reverses sign while remaining statistically significant after controlling for its possible endogeneity. Our estimates imply that when parental responses are taken into account, policy changes in school quality end up having only minor impacts on child test scores.

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Excerpt from Introduction: In this paper, I examine the determinants of the work hours of married female respondents in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 (NLSY79) and their husbands during the 3 years following a first birth. There are a number of reasons to think that labor supply decisions during this short period could have long-term consequences for the economic independence of the mothers.

Bibliography Citation

Lundberg, Shelly. "Division of Labor in Exigency: Work Hours of New Parents in the NLSY79." Presented: Philadelphia, PA, American Economic Association Meeting, January 2005.

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In this paper we apply a bargaining model to predict how maternal employment may be related to children's power in making decisions about household resources and rules. The paper proceeds as follows. Section II. outlines a model of bargaining between parents and children. Next we overview the implications of this model for empirical investigations. Section IV contains a description of our sample drawn, from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Child data (NLSY-C), and the decision-making indexes used as our key dependent variables. Results are presented on family structure, mothers' work and children's autonomous and shared participation in decision-making. We find little evidence to support the adultification hypothesis.

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Concerns persist for years about whether individuals acquire more education than is required for their work, a phenomenon known as 'overeducation'. Ever since Duncan and Hoffman's seminal work (1981), much of the previous literature documents mixed evidence and interprets it as evidence for inefficiency and misallocation. To reconcile the contrasting facts, this paper first builds a vertical schooling and occupation sorting model based on a single dimensional human capital index, where education substitutes for ability. Both education and occupation choices are efficient in the theoretical model. I then use simulated data from the calibrated model to show that it reproduces patterns of estimates found in the literature. These estimates are in fact fully consistent with efficient decision making. Finally, I add lifecycle, information frictions and symmetric employer learning to the static model to derive novel and testable implications about the dynamics of education-job match. The paper then turns to the NLSY79 data to demonstrate that empirical evidence in the US from 1982-1994 is consistent with the theoretical model's predictions. Both the theoretical model predictions and the new empirical evidence rationalize the observed overeducation without implications of misallocation.

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This paper studies the rise of performance pay contracts and their aggregate effects on the labor market. First, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I document three patterns: (i) the share of performance pay workers grew from 15% in 1970 to 50% by 2000, (ii) performance pay workers experience higher earnings levels and growth rates and work longer hours, and (iii) invest more in their on-the-job human capital. These differences persist even when comparing similar jobs in the same establishment using the National Compensation Survey. Second, I build a dynamic Roy model with heterogeneity in performance pay, time-varying probabilities of receiving performance pay, and human capital accumulation. The model is calibrated using simulated method of moments on the NLSY79. Third, I use my model to gauge the role of incentives, the contribution of performance pay to rising earnings inequality, and evaluate a recently proposed counterfactual 73% marginal tax rate.

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In this paper, I examine how the introduction of indoor smoking bans affects individual smoking behavior using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. This paper addresses two main questions. First, are indoor smoking bans an effective policy tool for reducing smoking, and do individuals anticipate the introduction of the smoking bans? I find that indoor smoking bans are generally effective at reducing the probability that an individual smokes. Also, there appears to be some evidence that individuals are able to anticipate and adjust their behavior prior to the introduction of an indoor smoking ban. Individuals adjust their behavior in response to the implementation of city and county level smoking bans in their state of residence but outside of their own county of residence. I interpret this response as individuals adjusting their beliefs as to the likelihood of a future state level ban, as individuals are unlikely to be directly affected by these bans. The identification strategy commonly used to identify the effect of indoor smoking bans is to use the variation in the timing of the introduction of indoor smoking bans across states. Since smoking is a dynamic behavior, the decision to smoke depends upon the individual's expectations of future states of the world. Therefore, individuals may start to adjust their behavior prior to the implementation of the policy, and their behavior may change little upon actual implementation. By taking into account this additional channel through which smoking bans influence smoking behavior, I find that indoor smoking bans may have a much larger impact than what has typically been found in the literature.

Motherhood Delay and the Human Capital of the Next Generation
Presented: San Francisco, CA, Annual Meetings of the American Economic Association, January 3-5, 2009
Cohort(s):
Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher:
American Economic AssociationKeyword(s):
Age at First Birth; Contraception; Fertility; Human Capital; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Variables, Instrumental

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This paper exploits biological fertility shocks as instrumental variables to estimate the effect of motherhood delay on the cognitive ability of the next generation. Using detailed panel data on women in the NLSY79 and their first-born children aged 5 to 14, we find a year of delay leads to significant increases in math and reading scores: a 7 year delay produces gains on par with the black-white score difference. These results reveal a potential weakness of pro-natalist policies promoting early motherhood. While such policies may increase total period fertility rates, they will be less effective at increasing total human capital.

Bibliography Citation

Miller, Amalia Rebecca. "Motherhood Delay and the Human Capital of the Next Generation." Presented: San Francisco, CA, Annual Meetings of the American Economic Association, January 3-5, 2009.

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"The Bell Curve" (Richard Herrnstein and Murray, 1994) presented data on the independent effect of IQ on a wide variety of social and economic outcomes for members of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). To control for socioeconomic background, we constructed an index using the standard three indicators: parental education, occupation, and income. Among the many threads in the response to "The Bell Curve," the following question arose: How much would the independent effect of IQ have been attenuated if a broader set of family background variables had been used as controls? To test this, Sanders Korenman and Christopher Winship conducted a fixed-effects analysis of the large number of siblings within the NLSY, in effect controlling not just for socioeconomic status, but for everything in the shared environment of the family. The results were that "[w]ith a few exceptions, the fixed-effects estimates for AFQT [the cognitive test used in the NLSY] are remarkably similar to the standard OLS and logit estimates" (Korenman and Winship, 2000 p.146). The independent effect of IQ is robust across methods.

Bibliography Citation

Murray, Charles A. "IQ and Income Inequality in a Sample of Sibling Pairs from Advantaged Family Backgrounds." Presented: Atlanta, GA, American Economic Association Annual Meeting, January 2002.

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The transition of women in to the U.S. labor market was surely one of the most profound economic and social changes of the 20th century. In 1900 about 20 percent of women were in the labor force. This percentage rose to about 34 in 1950 and reached 61 percent in 2000; not far below the 75-percent participation rate of men. A key element in this change was the dramatic rise in market work among married women with children under the age of 18, whose labor-force participation increased from a rate of 18 percent in 1950 to 71 percent in 2000. However, for much of the last 50 years the rise in women's labor-force activity and its growing convergence with that of men, did not appear to be matched by a narrowing of the gender gap in pay...Through the years the gender gap in wages frequently has been a source of public concern and a puzzle to researchers. In this paper, I examine evidence from the Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) on recent trends and current sources of the gender gap.

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The labor force participation rate of prime-age men has been mostly falling since the late 1960s, with steeper declines during recessionary periods. This paper uses longitudinal data to examine whether men's prior trajectories of schooling, work, family, income, health, incarceration, and living situations differ between nonworkers and their working peers. It also investigates whether non-work status is a transitory state, and whether parents, spouses, partners, or others are providing support. The data in this paper are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), which contains detailed histories about individuals' lives across multiple domains. This allows one to drill down past top-level information about employment and schooling to create a more nuanced picture involving support systems, criminal behaviors, family formation, health, disability, and youth expectations regarding educational attainment and future employment. At the 2015-16 NLSY97 survey date about 9 percent of men, who range in age from 30 to 36, had not worked in the prior year. Most of these men had never married, about a third lived in a household with a parent, and almost 20 percent were incarcerated at the time of the interview. The vast majority of men who did not work in the year prior to the 2015-16 interview also did not work much in earlier years.

Maternal Prenatal Substance Use and Behavioral Problems among Children in the U.S.
Presented: Philadelphia, PA, American Economic Association Meeting, January 2005.
Also: http://www.aeaweb.org/annual_mtg_papers/2005/0109_1300_0502.pdf
Cohort(s):
Children of the NLSY79
Publisher:
American Economic AssociationKeyword(s):
Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Behavioral Problems; Canada, Canadian; Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY); Cross-national Analysis; Mothers, Health; Pre-natal Care/Exposure; Smoking (see Cigarette Use)

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In this project, we aim to investigate whether there is a causal effect of prenatal exposure to smoking and alcohol consumption on children's behavior. We plan to use data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey, a large, national dataset which provides longitudinal information on behavior problems of children at different ages, the mother's health behavior including substance use during pregnancy, and extensive information on other familial socio-economic characteristics. We aim to do the analyses separately for prenatal cigarette use and alcohol use, and to also investigate whether the effects on children's behavior change as the children grow older. ...In our preliminary analyses, we use data between 1986-1998. We confine our sample to children born in 1981 or later,3 for whom BPI percentile scores are available for at least one interview year. For each child, we only use the first year of data for which the BPI percentile scores are available.

Bibliography Citation

Sen, Bisakha and Shailender Swaminathan. "Maternal Prenatal Substance Use and Behavioral Problems among Children in the U.S." Presented: Philadelphia, PA, American Economic Association Meeting, January 2005.

Measurement and Mismeasurement of Social Indicators
Rand Reprints, Rand/RP-534, Reprinted by permission from the American Economic Review 86,2 (May 1996): 30-34
Cohort(s):
Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher:
American Economic AssociationKeyword(s):
Education; Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Income; Social Influences

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Copyright 1996 American Economic Association. Over the last few decades, there has been a spectacular increase in the availability of data on a broad array of social indicators including life expectancy, health, and education, and these data are routinely tabulated for many countries. In part, this reflects a recognition that the well-being of a population is not fully captured by measures of consumption or income. Measurement of social indicators is not without its pitfalls, however, and drawing conclusions based on comparisons of national aggregates is fraught with difficulties, especially when data sources are sketchy. This general point has been made forcefully in a recent issue of the Journal of Development Economics (see T. N. Srinivasan. 1944). The papers in that issue make a compelling argument for investing in improving the quality--and frequency--of data-collection efforts. However, even when "good" survey data do exist. serious and often quite subtle issues of comparability and measurement still abound.

Bibliography Citation

Strauss, John and Duncan Thomas. "Measurement and Mismeasurement of Social Indicators." Rand Reprints, Rand/RP-534, Reprinted by permission from the American Economic Review 86,2 (May 1996): 30-34.

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We analyze the determinants of family structure change. We consider the major proposed explanations for the dramatic changes in family structure in the U.S.: changes in (1) public assistance policy, child support enforcement, divorce laws, and tax laws; (2) labor market opportunities facing men and women; and (3) marriage market conditions. We model the behavior of women who make union and childbearing decisions, but we derive from the model the consequences of these decisions for the family structure experienced by children. We use panel data from the NLSY79 to analyze the fertility, union formation, union dissolution, type of union (cohabiting versus married), and father identity (biological versus step) choices of women born from 1957 to1964. We use the estimated model to evaluate the impacts of changes in policies and labor and marriage market conditions on the family structure experiences of children growing up during the early 1970s through 2004.

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The existing literature claims a significant dis-employment effect for teenage and young workers as minimum wage levels increase. Less well understood is the impact on the human capital investments made by those affected. Young workers who are able to find work with higher minimum wages may be less likely to attend college as the opportunity cost of that choice increases, thus lowering college applications and enrollment. Conversely, those who are unemployed by the increase may see college as a more attractive choice in hopes of competing for jobs at higher wage rates.

We use 1997-2011 longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth [NLSY97], including restricted geocode data, to further analyze the implications of a minimum wage increase on college enrollment for older teens. Using a multinomial logit model we find that an increase in the minimum wage leads to a lower likelihood of college matriculation among potential applicants. This adds an important factor to the ongoing discussion of minimum wage laws.